Gryffindor Prank War
by MagicGirlinAMuggleWorld
Summary: A series of pranks between Lily and her friends and the Marauders. The Marauders may be master pranksters, but Lily, Dorcas, and Mary won't back down without a fight! I started this on tumblr a a year or two ago to help break myself of the idea that Lily was a goody-two-shoes, plus I like writing early Lily-Marauders friendship. Enjoy!
1. Chapter 1

_February 1974_

The opening salvo in the Gryffindor Prank War was unintentional, really. I mean, Sirius fully intended to make it rain in the common room – he was far too good at Charms to make it rain by _accident_ – but it was late, and he was just showing off for his friends, and he didn't expect anyone to be around to actually get caught in the deluge. But Lily and Dorcas just happened to be sneaking back in after some innocent mischief of their own (procuring a late-night snack from the kitchens to cheer up Mary, who'd just been chucked by her boyfriend), and Sirius' storm cloud opened over their heads right as they tumbled through the portrait hole. The Marauders roared with laughter, and the girls shrieked and spluttered and, in the face of Sirius' smirking refusal to apologize, vowed vengeance.

Vengeance came just under a week later, when the girls levitated a five-liter bucket of glitter to the hover over the entrance to the boys' staircase and, with a discreet flick of her wand from behind the sofa, Lily dumped it on James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter as they came thundering down the stairs for breakfast.

"Well, don't you lot look festive!" Dorcas said cheerfully, when the boys entered the Great Hall a few minutes later. There were shiny bits of pink and gold glitter decorating their hair, stuck to their clothes, and spotting their faces. "What's the occasion?"

James joined her at the table, eyes narrowed in suspicion. "It was you, wasn't it?

"Me?" She blinked up at him innocently.

"And where's Evans?" Sirius demanded, as he and Remus took seats next to Mary. "Back at the scene of the crime, I imagine?"

"Crime? What crime?" Mary laughed. "You sound potty."

"This! This is criminal!" James gestured at himself, and Dorcas and Mary held back giggles. "I look like a damned party cracker!"

"I think it multiplies every time you touch it," Peter moaned. "I tried to brush it off my shirt, and now it's on my hands, neck, face…" he trailed off. "I think I've got some in my teeth!"

"That's the thing about glitter," Mary said, picking a piece off Remus' nose, "you'll be finding bits of it all over you for weeks."

Remus scowled and shook his head. "You know what this means, don't you?"

"What _what_ means?" Lily asked, appearing beside Dorcas. If she had been a cartoon, a halo would've appeared above her head to complement her sweet smile and fluttering eyelashes.

Unmoved by Lily's innocent act, Sirius leaned across Remus and flashed the girls a devious grin. "It means _war_."

...

AN: Thanks for reading! I enjoy trying to write these little things, instead of only writing later, romantic Jily, but sometimes I struggle with ideas. But I like this one, and I hope you did too! Comments welcome :-)


	2. Chapter 2

_7 February 1974_

Three days after the glitter prank – Sirius was _still_ picking pink confetti out his gorgeous hair – the Marauders struck back. While the girls joined Remus and Sirius for an animated game of Exploding Snap in the common room one evening, James and Peter "borrowed" their History of Magic textbooks from a nearby table and charmed them to recite dirty limericks whenever one turned a page.

Thus, the following morning: "THERE WAS A YOUNG LAD FROM KENT!" Mary's textbook screamed, before she was able to collect herself and slam it shut. Laughter echoed throughout the classroom, and Remus smirked at his housemates.

"Your move, ladies."

...

With Valentine's Day around the corner, Dorcas suggested lacing a box of chocolates with an extremely potent version of Pepper-Up Potion, which had effects similar to the laughing gas used by Muggle dentists, and gifting them to the Marauders as a fake peace offering. But Lily and Mary weren't comfortable with the idea of drugging the boys against their will – even if the effects of the potion were likely to be pleasant – so it was back to the drawing board.

After a few nights of brainstorming, they settled on a relatively harmless trick from Mary's summer camp days. While James and Sirius were at Quidditch practice one afternoon and Remus and Peter were hanging around to watch them, the girls snuck into the boys' dormitory and refilled their shampoo bottles with temporary Muggle hair dye.

The next morning at breakfast, James' curly bush of hair had a distinct red tint to it, and Remus and Peter's normally lighter-colored hair was now fully blue. And while Sirius was initially the most upset by this prank – he took a lot of pride in his hair, after all – after about half a day it became clear that his new purple highlights looked _great_ on him.

"Maybe we should've drugged them, after all," Mary grumbled over dinner, as Sirius preened and a fifth-year Hufflepuff girl stopped by to compliment the Marauders on their new looks (" _Very_ punk rock!").

"No," Lily said, giggling at her grumpy friend, "We're just not thinking big enough. Our next move has to be _brilliant_."

As if he'd heard her, James glanced at Lily and grinned. "Is that all you've got, Evans?" he called from the other end of the Gryffindor table. "If so, maybe you should go ahead and admit defeat."

"Never!" Lily yelled back, green eyes shining with determination.

Dorcas lifted her chin defiantly at her friend's proclamation and added, "We're just getting started."

"Good." James tipped his pumpkin juice in their direction with a satisfied nod. "Cheers to a bit of healthy gamesmanship, then."

"Or games _woman_ ship," Mary corrected, raising an eyebrow. "Because we're going to beat the pants off you."


	3. Chapter 3

_21 February 1974_

Perhaps taking their cue from the girls' hair-dye trick, the boys also chose a Muggle-inspired prank for their next venture.

On Thursday afternoon, Peter scurried to catch up with Lily and Mary after Care of Magical Creatures. "Brilliant lesson, eh?" he asked, smiling at the girls as they made their way up the hill. While normally Peter took whatever classes James and Sirius agreed on, he had refused to give up Magical Creatures even though his mates had ditched it this year. "Nifflers are such cute little fellows."

"They really are!" Mary agreed, grinning. "I wish I could keep one."

"You heard the Professor," Lily chided her gently. "They make terrible pets."

"Too right," Peter agreed, frowning as they approached the castle. He made a show of checking his pockets, then announced, "I'm such a dolt, I've forgotten my wand! I'll catch up to you." He took several quick steps back from the girls, waving goodbye cheerfully.

And that was the signal.

"Bombs away!" Remus hollered from the second floor corridor overlooking the courtyard, and six balloons filled with stinksap (two each from Remus, Sirius, and James) came flying towards the girls before they had a chance to react.

The balloons burst on impact, covering Lily and Mary – as well as a couple of students who had the misfortune of walking nearby – in smelly goo. Lily gasped and Mary screamed.

"Good luck we learned cleaning charms last week, eh?" James called down to them, teeth gleaming in a wicked grin.

"That'll teach you to mess with a bloke's hair!" Sirius added triumphantly, waving down at them from the balcony.

"This is foul!" Mary wailed. "Our hair will be far worse than yours ever was!"

Lily stomped her foot and growled in frustration. "And you liked your hair purple!"

"But you didn't know that when you did it," Sirius replied with a casual shrug. "It's the principle of the thing."

...

AN: The prank war escalates! Let me know what you think, and feel free to send me more prank ideas and I'll try to write them!


	4. Chapter 4

_10 March 1974_

Despite the moral ambiguity of her earlier suggestion to secretly dose the boys with Pepper-Up potion, Lily realized Dorcas might be onto something with the idea of getting to the boys through sweets. Plus, they owed the boys doubly, to overcome both the weakness of the hair-dye prank and the recent stink-sap attack.

So the girls ordered a birthday telegram, in the form of a giant, hollowed-out chocolate cake, and had it delivered to Charms class on the tenth of March. They fretted over the fact that Remus, more than any of the other Marauders, was likely to be skeptical of an anonymous birthday gift (James and Sirius would have taken it as their due without batting an eyelash), but they didn't want to wait until James' birthday at the end of the month, so they'd just have to hope Remus' love of chocolate would overpower his inherent skepticism long enough for the trick to work.

The trick being that, instead of having a beautiful woman pop out with a song, or stuffing the giant pastry with party crackers ("More glitter?" Mary suggested, eyes twinkling), the girls arranged for the cake to harbor a nest of Cornish Pixies.

The girls' instincts were correct – Remus was so delighted at the sight of the massive chocolate confection that he didn't think to question where it came from until it was _far too late_.

But unfortunately for our heroines, this ended up being a prank against themselves as much as the boys, because the pixies were indiscriminate in wrecking the classroom. True, they stole James' glasses right off his face, mussed Sirius' hair, and tied Remus' and Peter's shoelaces together, but they also upended Mary's inkpot, flung stacks of parchment from Professor Flitwick's desk, and nicked at least six students' quills. And that was only the half of it.

After the pixies had unleashed two full minutes of havoc, including pulling the tiny professor's robes over his head, Flitwick managed to stupefy the lot of them and dismissed the class early so everyone could get themselves sorted. He lectured James and Sirius sternly as he ushered them out the door, certain that they'd orchestrated this debacle themselves.

Lily, Dorcas, and Mary escaped during the chaos and made their way to the Gryffindor common room giggling hysterically. "All right, that got a little out of hand," Lily noted, once the threesome were safely through the portrait hole.

Dorcas grinned. "Yes, but it was _brilliant_ right up until those pixies started throwing chalk dusters." She shook out her robes, sending a cloud of chalk into the air, and she and Lily burst out laughing again.

"Well done, ladies," James said, coming up behind them with a scowl on his face. "Sirius, Pete, and I've got detention off _your_ mischief."

Lily felt a little bad to hear the boys were being punished for something they didn't do, but she stuck out her chin defiantly and said, "You can't cover a girl in stinksap and expect her not to retaliate, Potter."

Sirius shook his head back and forth like a dog drying off, covering the girls in another layer of chalk dust. " _I_ can't believe Flitwick didn't believe us! As though I'd send a bloody cake full of pixies to Remus."

"Wouldn't you?" Dorcas asked, with a knowing look, and Sirius barked out a laugh.

"Fine, I might," he admitted. "But you know I didn't this time!"

"And disrupting class – that's upping the ante, isn't it?" Peter asked.

"It certainly is, Pete," Remus said, rubbing his hands together with a devious look on his face. "Opens the door for all sorts of things that we – very nobly, I might add – had set aside as a bridge too far."

"Oh, come off it!" Mary said, putting her hands on her hips. "You charmed my History textbook to yell about a lad's—rather long—" she gestured frantically in the general direction of Remus' waistband, and he blushed.

"Rather long _what_?" Sirius asked, grinning wickedly.

"Appendages!" Mary finished, and the rest of the teens burst into laughter.

"That was hardly a disruption, Macdonald," James said, shaking his head. "You could dance naked on Binns' desk and he wouldn't even stop his lecture."

"Too right," Peter agreed. "I don't think Binns has given out a detention since he died! Any pranks that anyone may or may not have pulled in his class—"

"—in which we can neither confirm nor deny having played any part—"

"—are totally consequence free!" Peter finished, his voice rising to a squeak. "But Flitwick, he believes in consequences!"

"We could tell him you didn't do it?" Lily offered, a hint of desperation in her voice. "We didn't mean for you to actually get in trouble."

"He'll never believe you, not unless you're going to confess to it yourselves," Remus said. He smirked and added, "But that takes the fun out of it, don't you think?"

"Indeed," Sirius said, nodding solemnly. "Flitwick would be far too lenient, anyway. Any punishment you girls receive should come at our hands."

"That sounds…dirtier than you mean it, I think," Dorcas said, giggling.

The boys snickered. And instead of responding to Dorcas, Sirius just winked over his shoulder as they walked away.

...

AN: This is my favorite bit of prank war banter so far! Hope you're enjoying it :-)


	5. Chapter 5

_16 March 1974_

"You shouldn't have agreed to no pranks during lessons," James grumbled. He was seated under a tree by the lake, playing with a Snitch he'd nicked after Quidditch practice. "At least not until we'd paid them back for the Cornish Pixies."

"It's for the best," Remus said, lying back in the grass with his hands locked behind his head. He had been the one to accept the girls' desperate olive branch on this front, much to his mates' dismay. "You lot got detention off the pixies even though you _didn't_ orchestrate that. How do you expect you'd avoid punishment for something we actually _do_ _in class?"_

"That's probably right," Peter said with a sigh. "Especially in front of McGonagall. Or Slughorn." He plucked a handful of grass and idly sprinkled it over Remus' booted feet. "He's got a blind spot where Lily's concerned."

"He wouldn't be the first," Sirius muttered, aggressively carving his initials in the tree with his wand. James flung the Snitch at him, but Sirius caught it in his left hand and tossed it back at James without even pausing in his spellwork. James scowled.

"Well, what do you suggest we do, then? We can't give up!"

"No, certainly not," Remus said gravely. He frowned, thinking, then raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "We could use a shrinking spell on all their robes? That's a girl's worst nightmare, isn't it?"

"But that's kind of mean, isn't it?" Peter asked tentatively. "Wouldn't be right to make someone feel bad just 'cause they might have gained a bit of weight." He subtly crossed his arms over his own stomach.

"Besides, we can't get to their dormitories, can we?" Sirius said, seemingly missing Pete's point. "But—" his eyebrows shot up, and he smirked "—I've got a brilliant idea."

.*.*.*.*.*.

Trusting in Sirius, the Marauders spent the next four days writing literally hundreds of love notes addressed to Lily, Mary, and Dorcas and arranging for them to be delivered during breakfast at the end of the week. Friday morning, they sauntered into the Great Hall, all smiles. If all went to plan, within a half an hour, there would be over a hundred owls in the dining hall, and the girls would be surrounded by stacks of letters so high they couldn't see.

The fruits of their labors were not immediately evident. "Sirius, this doesn't seem like the legendary prank you promised," Peter said, frowning, as Mary smiled at a note from her "Secret Admirer."

"Yeah," James agreed. "It just seems…sort of nice." He tried not to stare at Lily, whose cheeks were turning pink as she counted the cards piling up next to her plate.

"Just you wait 'til the owl traffic picks up," Sirius said confidently. "My cousin Andromeda told me about some prat during her time here who had about a thousand Valentines delivered to himself during breakfast. There were so many owls flapping about that Dumbledore had to close the Great Hall for the day! Feathers and bird feed and owl droppings everywhere." He bared his teeth in a devilish grin.

"Sounds…disgusting," Remus noted.

But a mischievous smile much like Sirius' now spread across James' face. "And brilliant! We'll be legends!"

Sure enough, not ten minutes later, Mary had twenty-three envelopes in front of her, Lily had twenty-seven, and Dorcas had at least thirty. And the owls continued to stream into the Great Hall, through every window and every doorway. Most made it to their intended targets without incident, but a few were circling overhead, hooting in confusion, and others were perched on windowsills or benches, apparently waiting for the hubbub to die down before they made their deliveries.

And the letters in front of the third-year girls continued to pile up. There were now no fewer than sixteen owls on the Gryffindor table, pecking at people's food and nudging envelopes towards Lily, Mary, and Dorcas. All around the Hall, students were ducking and screaming as owls knocked over their dishes and swooped low over their hands on their way to the Gryffindors.

"This is starting to look like it could be as bad for us as it is for them," Remus said, as he dodged left to avoid an owl headed for Dorcas. It landed on the table with a thud and dropped a letter on her breakfast plate.

"Well, that's how the girls felt about the pixies, isn't it?" James said, shrugging. He plucked an owl feather from Peter's pumpkin juice. "But sometimes, you have to sacrifice a bit to see a great prank through the end."

"That said," Sirius said, glancing toward the front of the hall, where Professor McGonagall was eyeing the commotion at the Gryffindor table with much suspicion, "I think the end is nigh. One of these bloody birds just stole my bacon, anyway. Gentlemen?"

The Marauders stood at the same time McGonagall did. Peter clapped a hand on Lily's shoulder as he turned to leave. "All this for you three," he said, grinning cheerily. "Someone must really like you girls." She made a rude gesture in response, but Peter just laughed heartily as he waved good-bye.

"Yes, this is a truly impressive show of affection," James added over his shoulder, as he and his friends hurried from the Great Hall before their beloved Head of House could reach them. "I hope you're not taking it for granted."

"Oh, of course not!" Dorcas called after them. "We'll have to be sure to return the favor."

"And soon!" Mary yelled, flinching as an owl perched on her shoulder. She shooed it away, and it hooted its annoyance. "Very, very, soon!"

...

AN: The prat who tried this before, for those who are interested, was Gilderoy Lockhart. It seems like won't let me link to it, but you can find it if you read the entry on Lockhart on Pottermore. The imagery cracked me up, so I had to incorporate it. I hope to have more ideas for this soon, but that's it for now! Reviews are always appreciated!


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